"By all the good spirits, but you are a poet!" cried Rossel, and he sprang up with so unusual an alacrity that his red fez slipped off his head.
"A poet!" responded his modest friend, with a sad smile. "There, you see how low we have sunken nowadays. If it ever occurs to one of us to let any idea enter his head that goes beyond a whistling shoemaker's apprentice, or some celebrated historical event, or a bathing nymph, he must immediately hear himself scouted as a poet. Those old fellows like Dürer, Holbein, Mantegna, and the rest, were left unmolested to spin into fables whatever struck them as beautiful or odd. But, nowadays, the doctrine of the division of labor is the panacea for all things; and if a poor fool of a painter or draughtsman works out for himself anything which a poet could by any possibility put into verse, people immediately come running up with Lessing's 'Laokoön'--which, by the way, no one thinks of reading nowadays--and prove that in this case all bounds have been overstepped. If a poor devil of an artist has a fancy for poetry, why doesn't he go to work and illustrate? After all, it is a trade that supports its man, and one who follows it can be a thorough-going realist, and can easily guard himself against all danger of infection from poetry. But an arrogant wight of an idealist, whom the world refuses to keep warm, and who, therefore, must take care not to let the sacred fire go out on the hearth of his art--"
"You are getting warm without cause, my dear Kohle!" interposed the other. "Good heavens! it is indeed a breadless art, that of the poet, but a deadly sin it certainly is not; and I, for my part, could almost envy you for having such ideas as those you have just been telling me. I'll tell you what--finish your plans, and then we will both of us paint this beautiful story of Dame Venus inside there on the wall of our dining-room. The devil must be in it, if we don't succeed in producing something that will throw the Casa Bartoldi deep into the shade."
He knew when he said this what a great proposal he had let fall upon the listening soul of his friend.
Kohle, like all art apostles of his stamp, despised easel and oil painting, as it is usually practised. On the other hand, the great aim of his longing and ambition was to be able, just for once, to wield his fresco brush to his heart's content on a wall a hundred feet long; and his friends were fond of plaguing him about a wish that had once escaped him--"My life for a bare wall!" Heretofore no one had been willing to entrust him with a square yard of his house, or even of his garden, for this purpose. And now, suddenly, he had only to put forth his hand, and see his greatest desire for monumental art-creation fulfilled.